Uber Riders: Introduction to legal questions about riding in Uber

I’m a big fan of Uber, personally. I haven’t used Lift, but I understand it’s very similar to Uber and I use this service quite a bit myself when I travel for business. I use Uber. As I have started using this service, it has occurred to me that there are a lot of legal questions that pertain to Uber. Because the service is so new and revolutionary, I might add, there are a lot of legal issues that have yet to be addressed or resolved.

The law governing negligence is something that has evolved over the Common Law over the course of centuries. Literally when you go to law school, you read the cases that form the basis of our Common Law governing negligence. You’ll read cases that are hundreds of years old. Over the course of these hundreds of years, the law has developed in a way that it’s anticipated most common problems that we have, but Uber is brand new.

There are a host of new problems that have never come up before. The law has not yet caught up to that. A lot of these issues are unresolved and have never even been addressed by Courts. They’ve also, for the most part, been unaddressed by State Governments or Federal Governments in terms of making Statutes or Codes that give us the answer to some of these questions that I’m going to be going through here.

These are some of the most important questions that occur to me as a lawyer who handles personal injury cases and as a frequent Uber customer. I’m not going through all of these issues and discussing these issues for the purpose of throwing Uber under the limo. I happen to be a big fan of Uber. I use the services frequently and I recommend it to other people, but there are a host of legal issues, some of which we’ve discussed here that are brand new.

They haven’t been sorted through yet and you may encounter these legal issues if you are injured while you are a passenger in an Uber vehicle. If you have any questions about this, please feel free to give me a call.